ABSTRACT
Orientalism”, wherein one nasty Orientalism lurks inside another, like a set of
Russian “mamushka” dolls (Bakic-Hayden 1995). (The key texts in this sorry story, above all Kundera (1984), are more fully assessed in Comisso and
Gutierrez (2004) and in Bideleux and Jeffries (2007b, 8-22).) This was an early warning that, instead of being decisively renounced and banished, “essential-
ist” and “Orientalist” (pre)conceptions of “Eastern Europe” would henceforth be deployed more exclusively against South and East Slavs, Romanians and
Albanians.